DT: Creative Knockouts – Christmas in July – Polkadoodles

This was actually the first of the Christmas in July projects I started because I knew I had my design team project to make for the Christmas in July theme for Creative Knockouts. I chose to use the Cocoa Christmas digital stamp image from Polkadoodles and printed it out four times.

I know people like ideas of how to mass produce cards and colouring more than one image at once by doing the same elements for each image at at time is so much easier than colouring each image from start to finish. I think it reduces the thinking as you literally choose the colour and the way of colouring it once and then at the end you have multiple images ready to use. This is my first tip for mass producing – do things in stages.

The next tip I have for mass producing is to keep the background simple – in this case I took two pieces of 6×12 patterned papers – cut them into 5.5” square panels and then used the offcuts to add as little design elements.

As we know I don’t like doing the same over and over again so by using double sided patterned papers that coordinate I got four different looks but still could easily mass produce. So that’s my tip number three – use coordinating products to keep things as simple as possible!

My fourth tip would be to make your life really easy and premake sentiments – but I actually veered off on the make of these because I decided to foil the sentiments and fussy cut them out one at a time – so do as I say and not what I did and batch make the sentiments ready to grab and go.

Finally my tip would be to assemble as a stage in the making. Again I did not quite do this (partly as my desk was a mess and I didn’t have enough room to pile things up without them getting involved in a crafterlanche!).

So in summary – mass producing is best done by batch making each stage and coordinating products like the patterned papers really helps if you want to make it easy to pull together supplies with little decision making! It also helps if you keep your design simple – although there always ways to even step up simple designs … adding layers or extra elements like glitter glue – but in this case I decided these were done as they were – and so cute!

So there we have it four cards made in around and hour and a quarter including the colouring of the images and foiling and fussy cutting the sentiments.

Love them too – and have to say that image is just so cute!

Happy crafting!

Catherine